By Max Rosenberg
Theme Editor
“The Strangers: Prey at Night” thoroughly disappoints the audience between a undeveloped plot and a significant lack of horrific intrigue.
The sequel to “The Strangers”, released in 2008, “The Strangers: Prey at Night” carried over the same unexplained antagonists from the first film, in addition to an unmoving plot, only mediocre scary moments, and main characters that are extremely poor at making decisions.
Directed by Johannes Roberts, “Prey at Night” tells the story of a family of four who are vacationing at a mobile home park, on their way to take their troubled daughter (Bailee Madison) to a boarding school. However, a group of three people in masks terrorizes and hunts the family.
The entirety of the film takes place in the first night of arriving at the secluded mobile home park. As the family splits apart between the dad and son, and mother and daughter in order to survive, they discover that the other residents of the park have been murdered and that they desperately need to escape.
As a result of the entire plot taking place in one night, there is very little room for explanations. The audience never learns why the three masked people are attacking the family, or about various specifics about the main characters such as why the family is sending the daughter to boarding school. As a results there are holes in the story and the plot becomes uninteresting.
In addition, the “Prey at Night” redefines what is like to be frustrated with a character acting stupidly in a horror film. At one point in the film, the daughter walks out to get fresh air, and every other character leaves their cell phones in the trailer to go find her. Also, the daughter and son pass up opportunity after opportunity to pick up guns or other weapons that could be extremely useful against murders that use knives and axes.
Despite “Prey at Night” being a horror movie, it lack serious terrifying aspects. Most of the jumpscares are easy to see coming and the fact that the entire film happens in one night, makes the watchers numb to the scary scenes. Therefore, the film is not as scary as other horror movies that give watchers a break, only to bring them back into the terror.
The movie’s soundtrack is the one good aspect, upbeat eighties music is used at various horrific points to add to the terror of the scene. During an intense struggle between the son and one murderer at the park’s pool, the pool speakers are blasting ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ by Jim Steinem. However, even a great soundtrack was unable to save this film from its other negative features.
Overall, “Prey at Night” was a poor film that provided the watchers with little information or background about the characters, and led them on an frustrating and unexciting adventure that ended nowhere. There are numerous unanswered questions by the end and it is not worth even the short one hour and twenty-five minute runtime.
“The Strangers: Prey at Night” was released March 9, and is rated R. It is available in theaters nationwide.
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